Stars Are Born

My colleague Leo Carey, an editor at The New Yorker, sent along an obituary from London’s Daily Telegraph for Dorothy Layton, who died at age ninety-six on June 1st. Her acting career was brief: at age eighteen, in 1930, her boyfriend, Roger Marchetti, a high-powered Hollywood lawyer, got her seen in restaurants in the company of celebrities and “hired Max Factor to apply her make-up and the MGM costumier Gilbert Adrian to run up her gowns.” (Remember the line from “Hooray for Hollywood”? “To be an actor/ See Mr. Factor/ He’ll make your kisser look good.”) She was signed by M-G-M in 1932, appeared in a handful of movies (notably several with Laurel and Hardy, of whom, she said, “Laurel was the brains…”).

In 1934 Dorothy Layton left the film business and went to live in Baltimore, where she married Howard Taylor, who ran a company selling mattresses.

So whence the fame? Because, as Leo noted, she was one of a peculiar group of starlets, the WAMPAS Baby Stars—chosen by the Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers. Between 1922 and 1934, thirteen a year were chosen, and the group included some luminaries caught before they reached the spotlights. The most extraordinary crop, from 1926, included Mary Astor, Dolores Costello (immortal for “The Magnificent Ambersons”), Joan Crawford, Dolores del Rio, Janet Gaynor (of Murnau’s “Sunrise” and the original “A Star Is Born”), and Fay Wray. (Ginger Rogers was one of Layton’s fellow 1932 alumnae.) At the time of their coronation, none of these notables-to-be was over twenty-one years old; some were still in their teens. WAMPAS was clearly onto something.

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